


you do not have to be good

by marinersapptcomplex



Category: The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Character Study, Donna Tartt did said gay rights I will hear no other opinion thank u, Emotionally Repressed, M/M, POV Second Person, Pining, dang this shit hurts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-14 04:40:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20594852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marinersapptcomplex/pseuds/marinersapptcomplex
Summary: “You kissed me. We were fourteen. I still remember.”





	you do not have to be good

**Author's Note:**

> this is awful i hate it and it disrespects my madam president donna tartt but I wanted to write something for these two anyway before the movie comes out

In some dive bar downtown. Karaoke blasting, Sandy and Danny: _you’re the one that I want!_ Boris, somewhere. Vodka coke in one hand, cigarette in the other. Kitsey’s messages on a broken phone screen, heart eyes emoji, thumbs up emoji, butterfly emoji? You pick up the phone and hand it to the waitress. _Take this, take this!_

“You okay, hun?” Voice like long island iced tea. Manicured hands reaching over, sliding the phone back into your pocket. _Mwah, mwah, you’ll thank me later doll._

Long Island iced tea walks back to the bar, laughs to the bartender, points. Acrylic blue claws waving in the air. Poor guy, she’s saying, probably saying. Hands into pockets, head down on the table.

“Jesus,” Boris’ voice like God, or something. “I leave you for a minute, look at you now! Look!”

You sit up, your cheek is sticky with spilt drinks from the table. “I’m fine.”

“Don’t look it.” Boris stares you up and down. “Look like Jimmy Stewart from Wonderful Life, miserable, all sorry for himself, like—” His face falls into a dramatic frown, lips turned down, nose wrinkled.

“Fuck off.”

“And such a potty mouth, too!” Boris laughs to himself, loudly, then tuts, _tsk tsk_, teeth against tongue. Eyes dark and scary and crazed in the flashing purple lights. Sandy, cool as ever: _You better shape up, you better understand…_

“God, I hate this song.”

“Yah, what’s new Potter?” He reaches for your drink, throws it back, polishes it off. “You hate everything.”

“Where have you been anyway?” Laughing suddenly, unsure of why. Glasses off now, breathing slow and heavy, wiping them with the back of your sleeve.

His pale hand reaching into pocket. Little baggy in the light. Two tabs in clear plastic.

“Is that—”

Boris stuffs it back into his pocket, ecstatic suddenly. “Thought we could redo the whole thing, old times sake.”

“You’re not serious.”

  
  
“Serious as a heart attack, Potter.”

Boris extends his hand out and you meet it, allowing him to pull you up and out of the red vinyl booth, stumbling forward. One foot in front of the other, Dad says, at the back of your head. One step at a time.

As you both walk out the door, “Last time I took acid my dad died.”

Boris, happy-sad grinning, hoisting your arm over his shoulder. “Well, at least that can’t happen again.”

“Shut up,” Pulling away from him, arms back by your side, lanky and weird looking without the comfort of your coat pockets. “You know what I mean. What if something happens, like that?”

“It won’t.” Boris’ voice like disco lights in the dark, jumpy, excited. _Come on, Potter! Fuck it! _“You have my word.”

“Where?” You say, seeing stars on the gum-glittered concrete. “My place?”

“No, my place! I have place, great place, amazing place! All fancy, airbnb, yah?” Giggling like a boy, drunk too, pearly whites all commercial-like. _Nine out of ten dentists recommend. _“Or, you want to go to playground again? Watch sun go down, then beat the shit out of each other? Old times, eh?”

“Shall I invite Kotku too?”

More laughter, from both of you. In the darkness, Boris’ laugh is coming out from his heart and back into yours. Like some sort of weird and lovely feeding tube of happiness, better than morphine, better than oxy. Maybe, maybe? You’re not sure.

So walking and walking and walking. Past bagel shops and hookah joints, the place where Pippa gets her hair cut, where Kitsey stocks up on posh vegan ice cream and champers. You walk past the place where you kissed Julie hard on the mouth and tried using tongue, and then past all the dying businesses and restaurants Hobie had tried to save.

A woman on a street corner sells flowers wrapped in newspaper. Pink roses and peonies. Dying daisies and wilted stalks in tin buckets. Boris buys a bouquet of roses and pays her twenty dollars, then they’re chatting in Ukrainian. She reaches her hand out, she strokes his cheek, then strokes yours, whispers something to him.

“What did she say?” You ask in the elevator up to his apartment.

But Boris doesn’t say anything, just smiles and smiles and smiles and shakes his head and walks out the elevator to his front door. Keys in his hand, jamming them into the lock, smiling, smiling.

“What did she say?”

“She says you have an ugly face.” Laughing as he walks through the doorway, not bothering to wait for you.

“And, what? You have the face of an angel then?” Following after him, kicking the front door shut behind you.

“What can I say, Potter?” Drifting through the room, turning lights on, closing curtains, then moving through the kitchen like a ghost. Hand at the tap, turning, filling up a glass, sliding it across the countertop towards you. “Drink this.”

“I’m not thirsty.” Eyes away from the water and back to the apartment. Modern, arty, clean. Not Boris at all, but then, what would you know.

“You should sober up before you get fucked again.” He gestures to the glass, like you should know this already. “If we’re doing this again, let's do it properly, yah?”

Hand on the glass. Glass to mouth. Water down throat. Glass back down on the counter.

“Go on, drink up! We haven’t got all night, Potter!”

So: hand back to the glass. Glass to mouth again. Water, water, water down throat. Empty glass down on the counter. Looking to Boris for a smile, a green light, a go. His hand in his coat pocket, retrieving the baggy, carefully scraping the tabs out with his pointer and fore finger.

He walk towards you, he grins. “Ready?”

Nodding now. Nothing to lose. _Fuck it, let’s go._

He opens his mouth, stretches his tongue out. Pointer finger out, acid tab down, already dissolving. Then, his fore finger raised to your lips. You open your mouth, your tongue falls out, his finger presses down and pulls away.

“Now, we wait.” Boris smiling again, hand on your head now, ruffling hair hard. He walks to the couch and flops on to it, stretching his arms out and beginning to hum.

_One foot in front of the other. _You think. _One step at a time._

—

“Potter.” A voice in the darkness. A lovely voice. “Potter.”

Sound bleeds through the air in a strange blue wave that ripples like water over your arms and your legs. Like a ray of light through a glazed window. Metal on skin, hot body on a cold floor.

Boris, standing over you. Kinetic sand face. Fangs for teeth. “You awake?”

“Was I asleep?” Shapes in the air, in your eyes, dust from heaven maybe. You sit up and the world falls on its knees for a moment.

“I don’t know,” Boris on the floor now, head to knees knees to chest. Stop, start, hands in his hair, hands on the ground. “Saying something about Rembrandt, bullshit probably, wasn’t listening until you’re suddenly on the floor with your eyes closed. All floppy, like green bean, or something.”

You laugh, you’re mad, always been mad.Hand slapping knee until you’re silent again, feeling like a statue in a shopping mall. “How long has it been since we took—?”

“Seconds. Hours. Days.” Black hair over face now. “Who cares? We’re beyond all that now.”

Staring down at the wooden floorboards and seeing God. Messages in the grain. “Is this what dying feels like?”

“Or maybe birth?” Boris drags his hands down his face: candle-wax. “I need water.”

“Me too.”

Up and then walking after Boris, reaching forward, grabbing at his shirt. _Wait for me, wait for me._ His hands darting out all snake-like, melting with the metal on the tap. Blue water in the sink. Heads under the stream, drinking, drinking, then back to the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Side by side.

Boris’ face: liquified. “When I close my eyes,” lids shut, twitching, then suddenly open and staring into your soul. Cold air through an open door. “It is like so many things happening at once.”

Words came out like mud. “What?”

“Inside — I see everything. The big bang!” Whooshing sounds from his lips. Tiny little hurricanes in the air. “I see it all, all the lovely and beautiful things and it makes me sad. The world is so big and I do not feelso beautiful living in it.”

“No,” is all that comes out at first. “Don’t think sad things. It’ll make the both of us sad.”

Boris: wet-blooded and heavy. Eyes glittering in blue light. “But, I think I want to be sad… I think it wants me to be sad. It feels like good-sad.”

The hardwood floor is grass under your body. “Good-sad?”

“Like good pain, yes, like good pain.”

This could be a graveyard, a battlefield, a memorial. Two men dead in a field. Passing over to somewhere else. Do the women lay their flowers here? Do they come here to weep and plant poppies on your spines?

(_My body is on fire, Borya, I swear my body is on fire.)_

“I’m sad too. I’m sad, I’m sad.” Your hand at his hand, clutching, burning holes through skin. “Not good-sad. Sad is just sad, that’s how it’s always been, how it always will be.”

“Potter.” His hand on your face, then your hair. “I wish I could make you understand. Feels like — when you left Vegas. That was good-sad: knowing you were leaving to be happier, to live a better life, but also knowing that you leaving me was worst thing in the world.”

Hand on his hand on your face. Tears now, from your eyes, from whose eyes of whose face. “You kissed me. We were fourteen. I still remember.”

“Eight years ago.” Boris staring at the ceiling, humming slow, _you must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss…_

Eight years: searching for him in dreams, paintings, the grain in wood. Forty days and forty nights.

“Thank you for kissing me.” Something stuck in your teeth, a seed, a flower. “I thought about it the whole way home to New York. It never left me — _you_ never left me.”

“You never left me either, Potter.” Brown eyes, molasses, whiskey, tobacco. “That painting, I know sounds crazy, but that painting was — _you!_ Was part of you, really. You were with me, always, all the time. Wrapped up, hidden away.”

The fact of you burning up next to him, water leaking through the floodgates, laughing maybe too. Things happening, always. “You gave the painting away, gave _me_ away.”

_(Loved you, despite it, despite all of it.)_

“I regret it, will probably regret for the rest of my life.”

“I don’t mind — didn’t mind. Couldn’t forgive you at first.” Light: everywhere. Yellow and beautiful, too much, all at once, but still lovely. “But you’re right, you’re always right, it was good sad, good pain. Knowing you had stolen the painting felt like death, but then knowing you were back, here, that was also — a miracle in and of itself.”

Pain in your heart, your eyes, your limbs and lips. Pain in the parts where he has touched you the most. This is not a confession but something else instead, the human desire to be healed, to be loved, to be understood.

_(Borya, Borya, give me one last kiss, one last goodbye.)_

“You’re too kind to me, Potter. Always been too kind, even if you never meant to be.”

_(I could show you a diary, your name. Over and over, your name, your name.)_

Bodies, collapsing. Amsterdam at Christmas. The fairy lights and gin. Junky sweat and waiting to be dead. You were waiting to be dead, to be gone, and then you were waiting for him. You memorised Amsterdam, you memorised it all just to hold it in your heart and never let it go, never let _him_ go.

“Not kind, no, not kind.” A ripple, a wave. The way your soul leaves your body. “I’ve never been kind.”

“Yes — to me.” Boris becoming nothing, then everything. “You were — _are_ the kindest.”

Crying, from nowhere, tears in your eyes, Boris picking them out of your eyelashes. His heart beating against you, and then his mouth on your cheek, pressing soft and slow and quick. Drowning in gravity, in the air around him. _Sentimental fool_, Mr. Barbour at the doorstep with his newspaper.

“No one has ever treated me as kind as you, Potter.”

Arms around arms, eyes closing. Humming again, _the world will always welcome lovers. _Shapes split into shapes and sputter into nothingness, like a mouth with only cavities, a void with a view. _As time goes by…_

_(Borya, you could tear me apart and I’d love you for it anyway. Borya, Borya, leave the lights on, wait for me. I’m walking towards the sound of your voice.)_

_—_

Waking up and feeling something. A pain, outside of yourself, not really there — the taste of blood, somewhere. Sitting up and seeing grey outside the window, city lights dimmed, smog heavy and low.

Boris, not there. The way the light changes in New York rain. Scrawled handwriting on the back of a Dominos flyer: _Potter, had to leave for personal business. Sorry! Help yourself to anything in the fridge. See you soon._

You walk to the fridge, you open it. One red apple and a tin of sardines. _If my life could be summed up by the contents of a fridge, this would be it,_ you think.

On the F train home, wanting to close your eyes. Saxophone player with his hands in bandages, a girl reading Montaigne in the seat opposite you — to learn philosophy is to learn to die. Yes, kneeling in transparent light and waiting to be gone. _Everyone I know will go and some have already gone and each day I just get goner._

_—_

You drink coffee with Hobie and listen to the radio in silence. Neil sings: I caught you knocking at my cellar door, I love you, baby, can I have some more?

“So, Boris.” Hobie’s hands on his apron, wiping. “Gone again, is he?”

More for yourself than for him, “Sometimes I wonder if he was ever really here in the first place.”

Hobie takes a sip of coffee, hums. “Seems like a wild spirit, always running around, doing something.”

“Yeah,” not really listening anymore. Shapes in your eyes again. “Something like that, I suppose.”

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Hobie sets his mug of coffee gently down on the table and laughs such a quiet laugh it’s almost sad. “Being apart for eight years, I would’ve thought the two of you would never truly be able to hold the same bond you shared when you were younger. You know that feeling you get when you see someone you haven’t seen in years, and it just — it isn’t the same. I thought maybe you’d see each other, say hello and then part ways again. Just like that.”

The room getting smaller, maybe. The coffee scalding the roof of your mouth and your tongue. A spider on the mantelpiece, a spinning shadow beneath it. The world passing away under your eyes.

“But I suppose you two are unlike anyone I’ve ever met before.” Hobie smiling like he has pennies in his cheeks. “I guess — what I am trying to say is that your bond is strong, it’s different — you should never let go of the —” His hands in his lap then at your shoulder, squeezing gently. “You should never let go of the _love_ you have for one another, Theo.”

Not saying anything else, after that — just dragging his mug to the sink, washing it out under the tap. And you, completely wordless, shrunken in your chair watching as he tightens his apron and walks out of the room, as if perhaps, he might not have been talking to anyone at all.

—

In bed, wide awake but pretending to sleep anyway, stars under your eyelids, Boris’ voice in your own throat. (_How does it happen that I am I, and you are you?)_ Hands under the pillow, then around the bedpost, feeling for carved names: Pippa, Julie, Kitsey, Boris, Boris, Boris.

Phone vibrating on the bedside table, his face on your cracked screen, calling. Picking up the phone, you answer, “Hello?”

“Potter!” His voice is slurred, overdramatic, like an actor pretending to be a drunk. “Am outside!”

“Outside? Where?” Sitting up in bed now, reaching for your glasses, turning the light on.

Laughter like a thunderstorm. “Outside your place, _dolbojób!”_

Hanging up the call, pulling trousers on, _shitshitshit, _down the stairs and opening the door to Boris. His thick black coat, his hair falling over his eyes. The click of his lighter as he tries to light his cigarette.

“Let me,” you say, later, back in your room — reaching for his scratched up Zippo in the half-light. ‘Boris, come on, hand it over.”

Making a big fuss about it at first, “Hang on, give me a sec, almost there.” Cigarette bit between teeth, lighter barely giving off a spark. He lifts the cigarette out of his mouth and places it into yours.

You reach for a Playboy lighter on the table (Platt’s idea of a laugh), the ashtray too - setting them down on your bedsheets gently. Then lifting the lighter to the end of the cigarette, sparking once, twice before the flame is bright and orange and burning smoke into the air.

You pass it back to Boris, who sucks on the filter with such desperation it surprises you.

“Couldn’t smoke around the children,” another drag, another large exhale. “Was so busy, always doing this and that for the little ones — wanted to go swimming, running, skiing — never a moments rest, you see?”

  
  
“That was your personal business? Your kids?”

Boris, nodding furiously, cigarette already half-burnt between his lips. “Ah! Sorry! Rude of me, running off like that when you were so —” swirling a finger in the air, pointing to his head, like _crazy, crazy kid. _“Loopy.”

“Loopy?”

“Loopy, Potter.” Flicking the end of his cigarette with his thumb, inhaling hard. “Talking about good old days, yah? Soppy old fool, you were. Starting to think maybe Potter and psychedelics don’t mix, hm?”

Taking the cigarette from his hands, putting it to your lips: the ash falling off from the end and onto the bed sheets. Burning holes through white linen, Boris quickly pressing the embers out with the pad of his fingers, unflinching, smiling in fact.

“Do you remember when we’d be so high and so fucked up that all we wanted was just to — to feel something — anything. I remember we’d stub our cigarettes out on our arms and legs and wherever the fuck we could, and you always got me the worst, I’d always be cursing you out, like ‘Potter, you mother fuck!’ And I’d try to get you back, to burn you back but it never hurt you like it hurt me —”

Cutting in now, emotional but not too sure why. “I never felt a thing.”

Boris, strangely glassy-eyed as well, onto his second cigarette. “What did you say? Always going on, such a big mouth even when you were fucked up on pills, always saying, ‘Boris, do it to me! Do it to me.’ And, ah — silly me, fooling for it every time.”

“You’d always burn me and I’d never feel a thing. Always knew it was coming so I was prepared — if you know its coming you’re prepared.” All these memories, fitting around you like a glove, a safety harness.

“So smart, too smart for you own good.” The smoke curling up into the air and over his face like grey ribbons. “I wonder sometimes why you ever wanted to be friends with a _tvarýna _like me. I was a wretch, to you especially.”

“Never. You were my friend, my brother, my…” Wanting to say more, but knowing better: saying less. “I probably would’ve died in Vegas if it weren’t for you.”

“Potter, you were dying anyway, you poor sad _lyubyy. _I was just assisting with those little deaths.” His hand goes to your face, cigarette propped up between fingers. Smoke getting in your eyes. “Should’ve seen it sooner, your pain but, no — ignored it.”

Breaking away from his touch, “Come on, Boris, that doesn’t matter. It never mattered.”

“It did matter, Potter.” The moonlight bleeding blue on his face. “Stepping over the line, I know, but the first time you saw me in Vegas, you were so lost in the dark that you clung on to the first light that followed you, and then you followed it, even though, perhaps it was bad light, rotten light — not good for you.” Stubbing his cigarette out in the ashtray, looking away, then looking at you. Lighting a third cigarette. “And Theo, Theo! I see you now, here, big money big lights and — even after Amsterdam, after everything you gained and lost, everything you learnt — I still see you clinging on to the same bad lights — like you want to hold this pain in your heart for always — don’t want to let go, ever!”

“What are you talking about?” Not moving now, watching him not move as well. His cigarette made of stone suddenly.

“I just wish — I wish, dearest Theo, I wish that you wanted to be happy, wanted to be better; that you did things out of excitement, love, did things for yourself. But, see, instead your actions they are ruled by — fear! The fear to let go of this pain inside you.”

_(I want to let go, to reach out for your hand and hold it against my face and curl up in your arms and let you hold me as we both held each other once a long, long time ago.)_

“You have no idea, Boris.” Not angry with him, but instead sad. Sad because he is right, sad because he knows he is right too. “You have no idea about anything.”

To be asleep again, or back in the melty shapes of the acid trip, drifting, gone away. Boris stubs his cigarette out in the ashtray and sighs through his nose. His head in his hands, his eyes through the gaps between his fingers, staring at you.

“Sorry,” says Boris, moving the ashtray away from the bed, then shuffling closer. “Is it so wrong to want you to be happy, dear friend?”

His gaze eats through your brain until there is nothing left. No words, no nothing.

Boris surges forward, grabs your hand, holds it tightly in his own.“Find what makes you happy, Potter. Hold on to that instead, eh? Never let go.”

  
  
His hand slipping through yours, breaking away. _(Oh, Boris.)_ Standing up and looking down at you,then walking, out the door. The sound of his shoes against steps, the door closing quietly.

You turn off the lights and sit in the darkness. The stagnation of heartbreak. The hunt for an easy life. The human desire to be loved without measure, without condition is overtaken by the fear of something ineffable.

_(Oh, Boris. I wish I could tell you all the ways I feel and still be loved.)_

_—_

Days later, sitting in your empty apartment, draining a bottle of wine. You pick up the phone and call him.

“Potter?” He asks quietly. “Everything okay?”

“I never felt lonely when we were together. I was lonely around a lot of people, truly, but I think that I was least lonely with you, Boris.” Cut open, your heart in your hands. “That night, the night we took acid, I think I wanted to kiss you.”

Gentle silence. Traffic on the other line, someone yelling in Russian. A shaky laugh from Boris, “Am happy to hear that, Potter.”

Laughing with him, over him. The outline of your body in the window against the city skyline.

“Perhaps, Potter, I would have kissed you back.”

“I’m happy to hear that too.”

—

He returns to New York and you wait for him at the airport and it feels like a love-scene out of a movie. His smile and his mop of curly black hair appearing at the gates. Hands shaking inside of your pockets.

You hug him like you have never hugged anyone before in your life.

“Easy, Potter, easy.” He whispers into the crook of your neck and his hand reaches up to your face, fingers grazing over freckles, scars and pockmarks, blood beating thin under the skin of your cheek. “I missed you too.”

**Author's Note:**

> obviously I can't speak Russian, Ukrainian etc but here are a few translations of what boris was saying lol
> 
> dolbojób - dumbass/idiot  
tvarýna - animal/creature  
lyubyy - dear/darling


End file.
